I knew something dramatic was probably in the pipeline ever since they brought in the effusive Bill Barney to lead the company in January. If the name didn't give it away already, the company is aiming squarely at the cloud by hoping to provide the pipes and data services that connect cloud nodes to other cloud nodes and to the enterprises that will use them. But they are also talking more about data center investments than I have heard in the past, with expansion plans foreshadowed in Asia and the Middle East. The details behind all this will take some time to emerge I'm sure.

Notable is the lack of the 'com' piece of the name, or any other older reference to networking or telecom or fiber. Of course the assets remain what they were: the 67K route miles of undersea cable that were once Flag, the metro Ethernet business that was Yipes, the managed services portfolio that was once Vanco, and the investments they layered on top of those over the years to bring it all together.

For the last few years Reliance Globalcom had been on the auction block in various forms as the parent company was hunting for ways to monetize it and thus relieve its own balance sheet pressures. That long and unsuccessful effort ended with Bill Barney's arrival, as did Globalcom's, shall we say, restrained efforts to market itself. With the rebranding as Global Cloud Xchange, the former Pacnet CEO is clearly on board to shake things up.

Now about that name.... Global Cloud Xchange is so long, will we be using GCX as shorthand before long? Reliance GCX? GC Xchange?